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Reflections

First Line Fiction Prompt# 23

Arpad Nagy
First Line Fiction
8 min readJan 8, 2025

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Through a fish-eye lens, we see a man, age 67, in fishing waders and a fly fishing rod in hand, sitting on a boulder and looking at his smiling reflection in the calm water of a river pool. In the background, a dreamlike vision shows twin children, a boy and a girl, and his wife in a family scene.
Image created by author using Bing AI Image Creator, not nearly as successfully as he would have liked.

His reflection smiled at him, but he hadn’t moved a muscle. Calvin Hodge sat on top of the three-quarter submerged boulder in the still water of the crystalline alpine pool, staring at the face looking back at him. “What are you smiling at, you old fart? The climb down here almost killed you!”

Although he’d been coming to the narrow cut in the river, pinched between the opposing enormous granite crescents crowned with spires of lodgepole and tamarack pines for years, he suddenly felt lost. He wondered if this trip would be his last to the watery hold.

When home wasn’t a refuge, this small piece of wilderness was, and much like reaching his front door, he arrived at this place consumed with the same thought: “Do I still have the last thread of my heart?”

The prize Western Slope Cutthroat trout he’d affectionately named Frank the Tank” made his home beneath the undercut of the ancient rock that split eons ago from the glaciers cutting the valley floor. Upstream, the water ran wide and flat, tumbling over pebbled shoals in playful gurgle before the channel narrowed and the river’s voice rose to a roar. A whitewater ribbon churned and frothed, feeding into the gorge before washing out again, broad, emerald and serene.

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First Line Fiction
First Line Fiction

Published in First Line Fiction

Each week, I will give you a new sentence — the first sentence for you to write a piece of short fiction. From drabbles to several-minute reads — let your imagination take you where it will!

Arpad Nagy
Arpad Nagy

Written by Arpad Nagy

Shortlisted for 2024 Northwind Writing Award in NF/Fiction. New owner of First Line Fiction. Editor @ The Memoirist, AoE, Book Cafe, Short Place, Kitchen Tales.

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